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Nathan On The March! Um, in March!

That's right: I'm practically on tour this March!

On the heels of five recent award nominations and two speaking sessions, I'll be going to three tradeshows this month. If you're a conference monkey, too, you'll see me at FlashForward 2006 in Seattle, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive in Austin, and MIX06 in Las Vegas.

Looks like I'll have to take my own travel advice seriously as I Road Warrior my way across the West.

So what'll I be doing at these shows, exactly?

FlashForward 2006, Seattle

This show is a complete double-whammy: Fluid's work is up for two awards and I am lecturing there.

The award nominations are for two configurator projects I've worked on: the Timberland Custom Boot configurator and Reebok's RbkCustom.com. I was the visual designer on the former, the information architect and production director on the latter, and a co-creative director on both. Needless to say this is quite an honor, and one that is shared with the rest of the Fluid teams that made these projects happen. Keep your fingers cross and we'll see what happens!

I'll be there for the whole show, but on March 2nd, Fluid engineer Darren David and I will be lecturing on, quite by coincidence, those two projects that are nominated for awards! Our session is entitled, perhaps predictably, Deconstructing Timberland and Reebok. Both the Timberland and Reebok projects were measurable successes for our clients, and definitely broke new ground in terms of both interaction design, Actionscript authoring, and production planning. If you're at the show, come by our session and we'll take the wraps off and tell you how these projects were done.

At some point I'll get some personal-insight case studies of those projects online here in the Interaction section, but in the meantime check them out at Fluid.com.

SXSW Interactive 2006, Austin

Fluid's work is nominated for three awards at SXSW Interactive!

The award nominations are for the Timberland Custom Boot configurator (yes, again!), the Design Within Reach FLOR Designer, and TheNorthFace.com. I was lead information architect on the FLOR Designer; I can't take any personal credit, though, for The North Face site. Its slick gorgeosity is due to the efforts of, well, almost everyone else at Fluid except me! I'm honored to go to the show, though, and represent our crew. The awards ceremony will be on March 12th, so wish us luck...and to all the other finalists!

I won't be speaking at the show but I'll be session-hopping, learning and pressin' flesh from March 11 through March 13. Oh, and shopping for the perfect cowboy hat.

MIX06, Las Vegas

This is a very interesting concept for a conference: Microsoft pays to have designers, developers and business people meet in Las Vegas to talk about What's Next in the world of consumer interaction design and consumer experience. Fun!

I'll be speaking there on the Selling The Experience panel, discussing not just why user experience matters, but how to sell it into one's own organization or, as is more common in my line of work, how to sell this concept to clients. How to do you justify the cost of developing a better user experience and quantify its success? That's what we'll be discussing, and it should be pretty interesting. I'll be hangin' with peeps from frog and Odopod, so it should be fun to hear some theory and trench stories on this topic.

That familiar Fluidian Darren David will also be there, speaking about a demo he created for The North Face using WinFX/Avalon technologies. Stylin'!

No awards at this show ... unless I sweep the Worst Dressed Speaker category, which is likely.

Don't Be Shy, Say Hi!

If any of you out there will be at these shows, don't hestitate to track me down and say howdy! If not, please be patient while I recover and try to get another article posted in April...